A forum for anything about the Steem Engine STE emulator, comments, problems, bug reports etc. Steven Seagal regularly provides updated versions of the original STEem code. The current version is v3.9.4.

I want a program on my PC to be able to talk to a STOS program running in Steem. It is entirely possible my problem is with STOS, not Steem, so I've also cross-posted to that forum here.

I've configured my Steem serial port to be a file on my PC. I can write to this file in STOS by printing text to the AUX port. But I cant seem to read from this file. I'm not even sure if or how that should work. My program just waits & never receives any data from the port. Even if I write to the file using a text editor on my PC, then save and close the file, nothing happens in my STOS program.

So I guess my questions are - has anyone ever got 2-way communication happening over the serial port in Steem, using a file? Or perhaps directly between Steem's serial port & your PC's serial port?

And can anyone suggest a better way of sending & receiving data to a program running in Steem?

Oh any by the way - Mr Segal if you are reading this - the ports settings window in v 3.9 is a little messed up - if you select anything except 'none' for the Parallel / Serial / Special Adapter ports, the container panel isn't big enough to show the child controls that appear. v3.7 seems fine, but has less UI elements.

Normally bug reports for Steem SSE are expected here:viewforum.php?f=112but the ugly bug is obvious enough, argh! It's when I added the 'special adapters' option, thx for the report.

I'm afraid the file for ports is output only.From the manual:

-File

Using this option you can send all output from an ST port to a file. Click on the "Change File" button to open the file selector where you can select the output file (you can create a new one by typing in a new name and clicking "Open"). The "Reset Current File" button will delete everything that is currently in the file.

Ok, so I guess I can just resort to my backup plan, which was actually use shared files that both the emulated ST & my PC can access - i.e. files on the harddisk, or in the PRG folder of Steem. Not ideal, but it will probably work. And I'll probably use two files, as you suggest Dal - one for input & one for output.

It could work with a virtual serial port driver, not sure a freeware one is available.An input file looks like much trouble to me:- GUI: Where do we add it?, it's already a mess - Timing: When does transmission start and stop? Do we need even more GUI elements ('play','stop'...)?